Busy Day on the Farm...

     

     It’s been quite a busy day here on the farm; I’ve got an impressive amount of things going on considering I’m also nursing a category five hangover. Last night I went out and celebrated my birthday with a large group of friends and didn’t roll back onto the homestead until well after three in the morning.

     My mom is busy in the kitchen canning up some more Jam, still trying to save as much of the fruit from the freezer overload debacle as we possibly can. I have no idea how many batches she is going to get done today, and it doesn’t really matter considering we already have enough jam preserved to see us through a zombie apocalypse.

     I spent the better part of the morning working one of our raised garden beds and planting the garlic I should have planted back in September. I don’t know if it will survive; I’m hoping that with the mild winter we have had, come August I will be harvesting fifty heads of organic heirloom garlic. With as much as I love (and love really isn’t strong enough of a word) garlic, those fifty heads won’t last me all the way through next year, so I’ll probably have to supplement the stash with whatever I can find at our local farmers market this fall.

     Meanwhile, I’ve got the wine quietly brewing in the corner of our great room. I added the yeast two days ago, and it is actively bubbling away. In about another five days I will transfer the batch over to the secondary fermenting jug and then I’ll be able to forget about it for a month.

     I’ve got the starter for a loaf of sourdough rising in the other corner, feeding and growing the yeast every day. It takes about fourteen days to make a loaf of sourdough from scratch, and I’m nearing the end of the cycle, so I should be ready to bake a loaf or two by Tuesday. Once you have the starter established, you just have to keep ‘feeding’ it with more flower and water daily, and you could make a fresh loaf of sourdough every day of the week. I’ll post some picture of that adventure later in the week; I’ll also go into more detail about how I grow the starter.